“I wish life was like banking,” I said. “I don’t mean it’s straightforward. Some of it’s incredibly complicated. But you can understand it in the end, if you try hard enough. Or there’s someone, somewhere, who understands it, even if only afterward, after it’s too late. The trouble with life, it seems to me, is that it can turn out to be too late and you still haven’t understood it.” (Julian Barnes, from Talking It Over)Continue Reading »

It was not the sufferings of the maimed and the dead that pained him, but the very absence of that pain; he could not forget those terrible scenes, the blood and mud, the bundles of squirming flesh, but, remembering, he felt nothing, nothing, and this emptiness horrified him. (John Banville, from Doctor Copernicus)Continue Reading »